The best way to do load balancing

[asamon]

I am in an environment with 4400 series WLC ver 5.2 .  I have a situation in a classroom setting where 30+ students will be in the same room all with Macs.  There are two 1400 series LAPs.  I have read through this forum ad nausium to learn that Aggressive Load Balancing is hit or miss.  The impression is that it is mostly miss, especially where Macs are concerned.  The concept of putting these access points on seperate WLANs, and configuring 1/2 the Macs to use AP-a and the other half AP-b seems less than elegant, and it appears that I would have to upgrade the WLC to the latest and greatest software level.

Questions:

1.  Since most of the discussions i read were pre 2009, do the wireless adapters on new pc's acknowlege the result code 17, and actually look to associate with a different access point?

2.  Does seperating the two access points into seperate wlans, and configuring the pcs accordingly actually accomplish my load balancing?

3.  Is there any other way that I have not mentioned to do this?

Thanks!

Andy

[Nicolas Darchis]

Hi,

Why would you need the latest software ? 5.2 already supports ap groups (=having certain APS only broadcast certain ssids).

1) As far as I'm concerned, mac always give troubles (I own a mac so I'm not even anti-mac). But I didn't recently checked how it behaves with the code 17.

2) Although not elegant, it will achieve load balancing if the APs are on different channel

3) Did you try leaving things as they are ? If clients are not too stupid they should pretty load balance more or less between the APs in the classroom

Nicolas

[wintersweat2000]

Gday,

As far as I have heard, the acceptance or rejection of Reason Code 17  depends entirely on the client/WLAN card. It is upto the client, to acknowledge and move on when it receives "Reason Code17" but if it does not and persists to connect, the AP accepts the request. If you have WLC4402, you have "Maximum Denail Count" settings where if your value is "20", the WLC accepts the connection after 20 rejected attemp.

I am as well going through the same nightmare on load balancing. Any help from anyone out there would be awesome.